In 2007, I came to live, for a humid fall season, in the home where I am writing this now. In this home a woman, now long dead, hunched over a typewriter--at least, I always imagine Carson McCullers hunching when she wrote, because her shoulders in photos always look slightly rounded, and her body seems to curl into anything she cares most about, she loves--and here she dreamed and got up and paced around and looked at the patterns in the carpet, waiting for the words, the idea, the…

I've been thinking about my ballet-dancing days today.  As some of you know, before I was a writer, I was a professional ballet dancer, a career I loved to the moon and back; the stage also taught me a great deal I would use on the page--about rhythm, pacing, arc, tempo, movement, stamina, how to keep going going going until you think you…

Dear Friends,

Yesterday I led a writing workshop at a writers conference, and today was contacted by a participant with questions that still burned: How do we keep going?  How do we make ourselves keep writing, without any real deadline or urgency?  How on earth do we stick to it?

Here, in part, was my answer to this serious, thoughtful, curious writer:

"I do understand entirely how it is easier to work when you have deadlines imposed from outside you.  But in general,…